Meet Arlene Harris

Thanks for sharing your story with us Arlene. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I found out I had a love of writing as a child while writing my own short stories, poems, or just journaling about my day. My mother helped me write my first resume when I started to look for a summer job when I turned 16. About a year after that, I updated my own resume and received follow-up pretty quickly when I applied for jobs again that following summer. My friends would always ask how I received an interview invitation so quickly, and I said well, I just sent in my resume with the application. My friends started providing me with their resumes to review and I started helping them write their own professional stories and helping them communicate the knowledge, skills, and abilities they had.

Fast forward to graduating from college with an undergraduate degree in education, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I knew I enjoyed sharing knowledge with people and being of service. After several office jobs, I realized I always liked talking to human resources professionals when I started with a new company. I would often brag about how awesome my HR team was and I would get hit with horror stories from others, of how people felt about human resources… long story short, they weren’t fans of HR. From that moment I was determined to turn that narrative around because I knew that HR professionals were there to help employees and the business. I naturally gravitated to recruitment because it gave me an opportunity to connect with and speak to so many different people from all walks of life and low and behold I started helping people with their resumes.

As a recruiter was very frustrating to me when hiring managers passed over qualified applicants just because of a small typo, the common message I would get was “well that just shows their lack of attention-to-detail look at that typo.” After hearing that enough times, I just thought, you know what, not everyone knows how to draft a resume, and with competition getting so stiff with the ease of online applications, I never wanted anyone else to be taken out of the running initially for something as small as a typo. In 2017, I launched Harris Writing Services, LLC and the business has been overwhelmingly successful!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Some of the obstacles I’ve found with running a small business is the amount of time it takes. Everyone always wants to flaunt about being an “Owner” and how amazing it is, but very few talk about how time-consuming things are in the beginning and how much effort you need to put into your business for it to really thrive.